E-COMMERCE WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT: STEP BY STEP!

Online business is booming, and online shopping statistics say that e-commerce development is the way to go for any growing business. Nowadays, we can buy and sell anything through the internet. With the trend of online business, building an e-commerce website will strengthen the reputation of your company and help you expand your brand nationally and internationally. It also creates and expands your professional network. In this article, we’ll show you how to build an e-commerce plan to launch a website in 7 steps, quickly and easily, without any special technical skills or experience.

1. Start with a Strategy

The very first step is always essential to help you build a good plan with a smart strategy. If you are just beginning your research, all of the information about e-commerce development can seem both complex and overwhelming. Building an e-commerce website used to require extensive technical understanding and a dream, but with the massive options for e-commerce platforms. All you need to do is a little research to move your growing business online.

To make sure that you can gain more profit while building an e-commerce website, start with a good strategy. Even the most straightforward e-commerce services have details that need to be just fit you and your business. For example, everyone assumes that they have outstanding customer service, but you’re headed into a world where your life could depend on your e-commerce site. Don’t you want 24/7 customer support and friendly staff available to troubleshoot anything that might arise?

It’s significant to contemplate your greatest needs and challenges as your business grows. If you plan to sell physical products, decide how you want shipping to work in advance.

If you’re selling digital products, think about the bandwidth and delivery options you’ll need. Selling services online? List out exactly what you’ll be selling, how you want to deliver it, and any payment or time limitations. Develop a marketing strategy before building an e-commerce website, and start early with SEO, because it can take a year for even the best SEO strategy to show results.

2. Choose a Domain and Platform for Your E-commerce Website

Business owners and solo managers need a platform that they can simply link and integrate with their existing site. Alternatively, if you don’t have a site yet, you will benefit from a platform that assists you to build a site from zero, in a few easy steps. A custom domain gives your e-commerce store:

• A recognizable brand that belongs to you, the name of the brand must be creative and unique.
• A professional email address linked to your domain where people can contact you
• Search engine optimization (SEO) benefits

Your next step is picking the right e-commerce platform for your growing business. You ideally want to create an e-commerce website on a platform that’s flexible and easy to use. Most small business owners don’t want to bother with hand-coding their website. If you’ve already got a website, you can easily build an e-commerce website by adding buy buttons or widgets. You can also embed a simple store directly on your site. If you are a beginner, you may consider some e-commerce platform that is available and has open sources such as Magento or Shopify.

3. Design Your Store and Add Products to your E-commerce website

The next step in building an e-commerce site is to design your online store. Think about what, in addition to your products, you plan to include. At the very least, you will want to add an about page and a contact page as you build an e-commerce website to help potential customers connect with you. You can also upload videos and text onto your pages.

When building an e-commerce site, be sure that you have various types of media:

• Photograph: People like dealing with real people
• Store name: It depends on your domain, but you can always change this as you want.
• Logo: For branding and recognition, you need to have a unique logo that sticks to your products.
• Trustmarks and payment logos: These make your site look more professional and creative people the feeling of comfortable shopping with your website.

Select a theme that represents your brand and allows you to showcase your products in the best light possible. Create categories that are logical to your buyers. Learn as much about your ideal customer as you can and design your site with their preferences and perfect user experience in mind.

Now it’s time to add some products to your new e-commerce website. Remember that the more detail you descript your products, the more likely that the customer will choose to buy them. It is because they have all the information to make sure about the trade.

Remember that the way you see your clients might not be the way that they see themselves, so find a way to ask their opinions as you develop your site.

4. Decide on Pricing and Set Up Payments for your E-commerce website

Before providing payments for an e-commerce website, you need to answer three questions:

• How will you price your products?
• How are customers going to pay for you?
• How are you going to get those payments into your own bank account or another credit?

After defining the answers for those questions, you may be rising from scratch or extending your local business online. Either way, the online world has different expectations for how you will put a price on your product. There are many factors to consider when pricing your products for sale online, include the cost of materials per item, e-commerce web hosting, shipping, taxes, fees and a percentage per sale deductions from various organizations, including PayPal, credit cards, flexible pricing, like pay-what-you-wish.

Then, you need to decide how your e-commerce site will accept payments. In many cases, this means finding a third-party payment processor to act as the go-between. One extremely popular payment option is PayPal which can be used by the customers worldwide. With these payment options, you can take payments from anywhere and give your buyers extra peace of mind.

5. Create a Great Checkout Experience

Shopping cart abandonment is the plague of online sales. In order to avoid cart abandonment when building an e-commerce website, you should notice some points that may help your website more powerful.

• Enabling customers to purchase multiple items at once
• Offering free shipping if you can, the buyers prefer a freeship rather than a discount.
• Being very clear about shipping costs upfront (before customers get to the checkout)
• Making sure that you optimize your checkout for mobile devices.
• Sending cart abandonment emails anytime someone leaves without completing their purchase

Don’t forget, the number of steps it takes to complete a purchase significantly affects your sales conversion rates. Test your checkout process until it is perfect and ask your friends and family to test it too. You can also have some outsourced company done it for you to make sure that everything is ok.

6. Market Your Growing Business

Once you start building an e-commerce website, you need to update your product to increase traffic and drive sales. Many vendors choose to sell from marketplace sites like Etsy or Amazon but find themselves struggling because of high fees and other limitations. After building an e-commerce website, you’ll need a solid marketing plan to bring the right customers to your site and to keep their affection for return business. Choose an e-commerce platform that can offer you some of the specific features:

• Offering built-in SEO-optimization for every product. Use the latest guidance on SEO to help people find your e-commerce website, products, and services online
• Providing free integration with MailChimp, AWeber, Campaign Monitor and more for email marketing
• Adding customers to your existing email marketing lists so you can inform them about new offerings
• Linking your e-commerce site with Facebook
• Enabling social sharing for your products – it’s a one-click process
• Giving you the option to create coupons or discounts to drive sales from return customers
• Include a blog or an ebook on your site to share engaging, relevant content, build trust, and attract new customers

7. Improve Your Online Sales with Data

Track the performance of your e-commerce website with an analytics solution. This will help you monitor your site and product pages so you can improve them for more sales, reach, and effectiveness. Building an e-commerce website isn’t for the faint of heart, but it is a chance to keep your business competitive, and to raise awareness and access for your incredible products. Follow these seven steps, and you will soon build an e-commerce website that works – in no time at all.

Nowadays, there are a lot of e-commerce platforms that are open to you. Magento is one of the leading platforms that we highly recommend. With superior features and extensions and a wide range of services at different prices, Magento will bring you the most effective and sustainable online business platform.

Proud to be Magento’s strategic partners in building e-commerce websites, CO-WELL Asia always brings partners with modern e-commerce services that leading the technology. With a team of highly trained and qualified engineers, CO-WELL Asia has completed many e-commerce projects for large companies and corporations in Vietnam and Japan. We always strive to bring our customers the best experience and help customers optimize their business. Visit our website for more advice and learn about plans to build an e-commerce website with many integrated features to launch your potential online store!